Random thoughts during last night’s insomnia

COTTAGE PORN: I can’t shake it off. I’d say, at a conservative estimate, I do about 20 hours a week on property websites. They’re truly the teddy bear of the bricks-n-mortar world. Small dinky cottages with two windows and a garishly painted door. After years of plywood apartments, listening to neighbours fart & beat up their wives, romanesque snores and kids painting walls with overly worked lungs, I demand life lobs me a cottage. In return I’ll try to be less aggressive towards people who let me down and junkies who I like to describe as ‘a Monet of clanking bones in silver Nike’. I love *tiny* cottages that really only resemble belt buckles, architect licked ones too beautiful to be lived in, awkwardly shaped ones that somewhere along the line begin to look as infirm as their cuppa soup geriatric owners, loud crashing seaside ones with sand and flowers and bugs in the garden, crooked ones that’d need a bus-load of Polish builders to put back together again. I love them indiscriminately in the way a deranged animal sanctuary owner loves pit bulls, without noticing any savage flaws. I’d fill mine with crooked wooden furniture, books I’ve no intention of reading on a rake of built-in walnut shelves and some awesome portraits by Emer Martin on the walls. I’d like a separate carved-out nook to write in, mosaic wet-room, open fire. Can’t abide people moaning about the ‘work’ involved in cleaning out the ashes, etc. What about changing nappies for years on end for kids you didn’t think twice about having and later deciding at 50 you didn’t really want (or need)? I’m easy too about where it might be, this cottage that’s coming my way: Dublin, Galway, France or Berlin. There are no cottages in Berlin. Obviously it goes without saying I’d need a cat too, a cynical black one or lazy black & white one (marmalades are malcontents). My love and I will take turns cooking dinner and in the summer we’ll drink low-end high-alco fizzy crap on a beautifully tiled & trellised patio with terracotta plant pots, not overlooked by inquisitorial neighbours who play their TV too loud when not moaning about roadworks and the cataclysmic drinking habits of young people.

AMY: So predictable as to be invertedly shocking. Why couldn’t anyone stop this kid in her tracks?

ENDA KENNY: Baffling moment in our pigeonhearted history of putting ethereal skypilots in their place. After accusing the blokes in dresses of frustrating the Cloyne inquiry, a holy row erupted between Ireland and the Vatican that led to the recalling of the Irish ambassador in Rome. Enda’s intonation was gritty-steely, genuinely angry and determined, a stance normally reserved for collapsing money markets and depreciation of brick. He rightly acknowledged that victim’s lives are shattered – they may never be able to pick up the pieces – while in some parts of the country, abusers continue to live freely and are still held in high esteem. A faithful Catholic demanding that the perpetrators of child sexual abuse face up to the full force of the law; this was a Cilit Bang moment in Ireland’s political recital. It ain’t that long ago that standing up to the local parish priest would ultimately result in total ostracisation, if not lynch-mob persecution from gobshites obsessed with life after death instead of living the present-tense fluky one. The local priest/bondage builder could tell you how to vote, who to marry, how many children to have, what to think. Standing up to clergy was only done if you were leaving town for good. “Childhood is a sacred space”, Enda declared, saying out loud what we’ve all been screaming for decades. “Safeguarding their integrity and innocence must be a national priority.” Irish politics is removing the cataracts just as the Holy See is declared righteously blind. The whole of Europe has been yapping about us since. Thank you Enda. Sorry for saying you looked as ineffectual as a petrol pump attendant from the Midlands in the run-up to the last election. Invariably, I was wrong.

JOURNALIST IN A COMA: Found myself feeling conflicted about news of the sports reporter, at the centre of an underage sex scandal, being in a coma. Tabloid ‘news’ [Evening Herald + Star] informs us his organs are failing and he’s unlikely to make a recovery at all. This ‘kinda’ [at least to me] indicates an overdose at some point which would fit in with the fact that he’s been on suicide watch for some time. It also suggests some sort of conscience and regardless of the grisly facts, this is quite a tragic end for everyone, particularly for the man’s daughter who’ll no doubt be saddled with chunky guilt and not much resolution. There are two extreme angles here: he deserves everything he getsor in our hideously sexualised modern world: did he really do anything wrong? I include the latter because someone actually said that to me last week in one of those I wouldn’t say this out loud but I know I can say anything to you pub moments. This was followed by a declaration that most teenagers these days are sexually active and look/behave well beyond their years. Well, yes, he did, of course, do wrong: a big glaring ugly aberrant wrong. But the way through this was perhaps to own up to those actions, face the law, trawl through rehabilitation, atone, learn from it, teach us something from it, even if life was never going to return to a workable norm. I interviewed this man 14 years ago for a college profile I was writing on Nuala O’Faolain. She considered him a ‘dear friend’ and a ‘desperately good’ character. I can’t help hearing her firebrand apoplexy from deep within the grave: “You stupid stupid man, just because she had breasts, an iPhone, red lipstick and a spellbinding smile, doesn’t mean she wasn’t a gormless child. YOU were the adult and the shock of finally realising this has killed you”.

DETTOL SOAP: Yer only man for an itchy arse. Hard to come by though. Not in supermarkets. I buy mine in Superpharm, Finglas.

HYPOCRISY: Psychopath Behring Breivik ordered ‘anti-muslim’ badges from India that were made by an Indian Muslim. As reported in The Guardian, Mohammed Aslam Ansari, owner of a small company in Benares, northern India, received the email order in March 2010 for a badge showing a blood-red crusader sword vertically piercing a skull marked with the symbols of Islam, communism and Nazism. Breivik designed the insignia for his Knights Templar group, and paid Ansari £90 for two samples – one in silk, the other in brocade. Ansari dispatched the badges by courier service but although Breivik had said he was interested in ordering 200 badges, he never followed up on the order. It sums up the flagrant lunacy of this grotesque tale while at the same time highlighting the absurdity of fanaticism. Historian and novelist Philipp Blom wrote that ‘human need for creating personal meaning generates myths, holy texts or ideologies. Believing those stories to be the truth makes us susceptible to fanaticism.’ You can find out if you’re a fanatic here.

CANCER: Nerves on high alert today as I wait for news on my 46 year old brother’s ‘Round 3’ cancer scan results. He’s been through the mill already and the thoughts of any further suffering makes me feel genuinely scared and angry. Thanks too to his c**t of a wife who left him in the midst of treatment, taking the kids (and all the white goods) with her. Enter Friedrich Nietzsche stage right ~ One should never know too precisely whom one has married.

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About junecaldwell

June's short story collection Room Little Darker is published by New Island Books in May 2017. She's a prizewinner of The Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted and highly commended for many others including: Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award, Sunday Business Post/Penguin short story prize, Lorian Hemingway (USA), RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland and Over The Edge New Writer of the Year. In 2010 she received an Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) bursary for fiction. Her work has been showcased at the Italo-Irish Literature Exchange in Nogarole Rocca / Verona (May 2012), Read For The World (June 2012) and Bloomnibus (June 2013) at the Irish Writers' Centre, Galway Pro Choice (Aug 2013), Over the Edge Galway (Dec 2013), Stinging Fly Spring Launch (March 2014), At The Edge, Cavan (May 2014), The Winding Stair Prizewinner's Reading (Sep 2014), One City One Book: DLR Lexicon Barrytown Trilogy reading (April 2015), Hodges Figgis Book Festival (Oct 2015), Bogman's Canon Fiction Disco (Nov 2015, April 2016), Doolin Writers' Weekend (March 2016), Five Lamps Arts Festival (Mar 2016), National Concert Hall: Kevin Barry Recital Room series (April 2016) and the Eastrogen Rising: A Rebel Cabaret. Her creative writing has been published in Woven Tale Press, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Literary Orphans and Popshot, as well as a non-fiction biography of a Trouble's moll with Gill and MacMillan in 2006. Her short story 'SOMAT' is published in The Long Gaze Back: The Anthology of Irish Women Writers, edited by Sinéad Gleeson/New Island. Journalism: The Gloss, The Guardian, The Observer, Sunday Times, Sunday Life, Sunday Tribune, Sunday Business Post, Sunday Independent, Ireland on Sunday, Irish Independent, as well as a number of women's magazines and trade journals.